To Sanction or Not To Sanction?

I have been feeling ambivalent about the effectiveness of sanctions for longer than I can remember but have spend very little time reading about this topic. This is partially why two articles about the effect of sanctions on Sudan linked by Chris Blattman particularly struck my interest this week. While I've read Prunier's book on Darfur I don't spend too much time following the conflict but these are worth a read to anyone who is interested in whether sanctions can affect positive change in a country (e.g. Cuba, Myanmar, Iraq, ...) though - sorry to disappoint - you won't find any definite answer here.

High Time to Lift Sanctions by Ibrahim Adam (which I read first) makes some interesting points but left me unconvinced. The most immediately questionable claim is that removing sanctions would allow President Bashir the resources (financial and political) to affect change in Sudan:

So, what’s in it for either John McCain or Barack Obama to lift the sanctions from Sudan? Big dividends. It would give President Bashir political space to hasten changing Sudan to an equitable, democratic country, as specified by the landmark 2005 north-south Sudan peace agreement – the policy anchor of US government.

I don't think that affecting change is in Bashir's interest and it certainly does not seem to be a priority and it doesn't seem to be a good assumption to base an argument upon. The following section was, however, far more interesting:

Removing sanctions would help Sudan’s political institutions mature, too. The deafening criticism of Khartoum by Washington accompanying US sanctions often crowds out civil society and government discourse on other important, but ‘normal’, policy issues. Agriculture reforms, for example. US private investment into southern Sudan, thus far stifled by reputation risk fears, would also surely grow strongly following the abolition of the sanctions.

While Daniel Millenson's rebuttal (more on it below) questions the causality of the war, I do think that the argument below played a role in escalating some of the underlying issues:

US-led isolation meant the Sudanese government got, for example, just $56 million in foreign budgetary support during 1994-1998 according to IMF data. At roughly forty cents per person per year, that’s hardly enough for the government to build some roads and a couple of schools in Darfur, never mind cater for all Sudan. Protracted, severe constraints on public finances in one of the world’s largest (10th), but poorest countries (141 out of 176 in the 2006 UN Human Development Index) could only ever lead to one outcome. Crystallizing or, in the case of Darfur, reviving older badges of identification (kinship, religious, locality and ethnic ties), due to the collapse of public investment and welfare spending over most of the last two decades.

Millenson's explanation for the immediate causes of the war seems more accurate, but I was more interested in the exceptions to the sanction regime that he points out - I think that details like this are extremely important to understanding the impact of sanctions.

Darfur reached its staggering death toll primarily because al Bashir escalated the conflict, arming janjaweed militias to attack civilian populations. In a relationship exactly inverse to that described by Mr. Adam’s thesis, the war in Darfur was bankrolled by the very oil-driven foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows he praises.
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While US sanctions have caused myriad headaches and missed business opportunities for the NIF/NCP regime, contrary to Mr. Adam’s claims, they have done little to further the plight of ordinary Sudanese. Then and now, US sanctions provide generous exemptions for food (which apparently even includes Coca-Cola’s syrup) and medical products to enter the country. It is hard to take seriously Ibrahim Adam’s claim that “‘excess’ deaths from US sanctions… probably runs into the hundreds of thousands.” Surely the government of Sudan, which provided the small arms and air force behind the initial and most violent 2003-2004 stage of the war (not to mention the North-South civil war), bears more direct responsibility for “excess” deaths.

The central question is still if and when sanctions are an effective instrument for affecting change in countries with bad leaders and if not, what would more effective alternatives be? I hope to have better answers at some point in the future.